Recently at HarvestTech 2015, David Herries and Jeremy Gibson spoke on utilising harvester information to improve value recovery and production planning workflows using a recently released Cloud Service called STICKS. STICKS developed by ForestPHD and Interpine provides aggregation and analysis of harvester information from any equipment supporting StanForD data formats.

This was put in the context of value recovery. When defining this we consider “value” as the maximum log value projected to exist in the standing forest, and “value recovery” as a measure of the efficiency of the subsequent operations, including harvesting and marketing, to realise that standing log value. The key is our ability to measure this. Using harvester data can change the way we monitor and realise value from our forests.

Figure 2 – Methods discussed for utilising Harvester Information to measure or add value during harvesting and marketing of forests.

With the goal to have “no man on the hill, no man on the chainsaw“, New Zealand forest industry is seeing a strong adoption of mechanised log manufacturing and steep slope felling using machines. Most of these processor machines have StanForD compliant computer systems which we can harvest data from. This might be simply a GPS felling location and a DBH if used for felling or full log production data is processing to log products in forest or at skid. The question becomes how can we use this data to benefit the operator, contractor, forest manager, forest owner, and log buyer / mill owner. A workshop was help after HarvestTech 2015 to discuss these very items chaired by David Herries (post workshop information available here)